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WCAG 2.0: Add Captions to Your Online Video

I recently read some obscene statistic about the HUGE amount of video that is getting uploaded to the Web everyday. It’s a probably safe bet to say that the majority of that online video doesn’t have any captioning. This is a big problem for people who are deaf or hard of hearing and are trying to understand the message of your video. According to Gallaudet University, about 8.6% of the American population or 20+ million people have some form of hearing problems.

Captioning takes time and its not easy. I wish there was a magic button that you could press and captions would magically appear on the videos you were making.

There is also MAGpie, the free open-source tool from WGBH’s National Center for Accessible Media. If you already have the transcript for your video, you can quickly turn the transcript into the xml file format you need to make captions for your online video. I have seen it in action. It’s not super seamless but it gets the job done.

The US Library of Congress has started to integrate the use of MAGpie and Flash video to provide captioning for some of their videos. Check out the videos for the MacDowell Exhibit. (Full Disclosure: With my government contracting job, I work at the Library of Congress full time.)

One of the most interesting tools I have seen is dotSub. You can submit your video to the service and then you or any of the members of the service can transcribe and caption the video. Once you have the initial captioning done, the captions can be translated into many languages. This is all done through the wisdom and knowledge of the community.